66 THE HORSE OF AMERICA. 



is not very large, and it is safe to say that not one in ten of them 

 ever saw Arabia. They came from Turkey or some of the Bar- 

 bary States. But in the case of Mr. Eichards there can be no 

 doubt that he made his selections in Arabia itself. Those selec- 

 tions having been made personally and with care and skill,, we are 

 bound to accept them as genuine Arabians. When we find, 

 therefore, that having been tested they are no better than the 

 horses brought from Turkey or from Africa, we must conclude 

 that the whole scheme is mere moonshine, and that Arabian 

 blood as a means of improvement has failed to develop the value 

 that enthusiasts and dreamers have claimed for it since ''time 

 whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary." 

 Practical and thinking men always judge of the value of a breed 

 of horses from what the representatives of that breed can do or what 

 they fail to do. The emotional and unpractical are always look- 

 ing for an ideal horse, and the poets and story writers are always 

 furnishing them one. Where a horse figures in a story he is 

 uniformly endowed with an almost supernatural intelligence and 

 sense. To finish up the ideal horse, he always traces back to the 

 "Courser of the Desert." If his triumph is in a flight of speed, 

 he distances all competitors because he is a pure Arabian. The 

 story of "Ben Hur," written by General Lew Wallace, furnishes a 

 fitting illustration of this tendency of the public mind. The story 

 of the chariot race at Antioch is a masterpiece of most exciting 

 ingenuity, and one of the finest specimens of word painting in 

 the English language. The irascible old sheik is quite over- 

 drawn, but the judgment and skill of Ben Hur cannot be sur- 

 passed. As a matter of course, the team of black Arabians was 

 bound to win. Every bright schoolboy in the country has read 

 the story, and he has joined in the triumph of the black Arabians. 

 The wide interest in the chariot race seemed to demand its pic- 

 torial delineation, and soon the public was gratified with a large 

 and elegant etching, which hangs before me as I write. The only 

 trouble about this excellent work of the imagination and the 

 team of black Arabians is that there were no horses in Arabia till 

 about .three hundred and fifty years after the date of this sup- 

 posed scene. We must let the poets sing and the novelists work 

 out their plots, but it is well to pay some attention to the facts 

 and experiences of history. 



